SEARCHING FOR A CHARACTER | PROCURA-SE PERSONAGEM | GIVE THIS MANIFESTO A BODY

 

This film was made for the experimental project GIVE THIS MANIFESTO A BODY produced by Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Curated / coordinated by C.Tomaz

a minimal story about a lonely man inside a house
miniDV / DV Cam 25'' 2001

LITTLE ESSAY ON QUOTIDIAN AND VIDEO

To film the quotidian. To film a character / persona daily life, who is already in itself the collision between a fiction and a person, a body and an idea. A staged quotidian. This mise en scène confuses the natural way of things, it hinders the continuity of an action that usually has to be made. In life it seams easier... in film there is the shot, the camera position, the frame that delimit the space, the gesture, that forces actions. One creates aesthetic moments of light, of colors, of placing a body in the space. All this creates limitations. The biggest limit is for the man who is in front of the camera: to want a character, to be there, searching for it, vulnerable, trying to fit the frame, trying to make significant things to get meanings. In this project I wanted to test those limits: what is to film and act alone? How to stage daily life? How to film the vulnerability of a human being? I started to work all by myself with Joao Pereira, the actor. Later we got a very small crew. With a crew – even if small- the uneasiness increases.

 

It increases proportionally to the number of existing people in the "set". The shooting place is called "set", but in this film (as in my cinema), never I called it that: it does not make sense, as well as it does not make sense in projects like this one, to say "action" or "cut", because the relationship is of complicity and concentration: for times a gesture or a look is enough to João to know that the camera is recording and it is time to start or I just call his name, not even loud... But even though the routine seams rigid, not natural. The routine is easy for whoever lives it, for whoever has to live it without thinking about it, but since the moment where we think about it - over all in the presence of a camera - it changes itself, it changes itself into aesthetic, marks, limitations of space, movements... all made not to leave the frame.

I wanted for things to have technical quality and judging me as an intuitive filmmaker taken by the emotions of the moment, I was afraid of making mistakes generated by hypnotic states of enthusiasm. For that I chose a crew that could give me, for beyond the company, the guarantee and security that things were well done.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But what is technique without emotion? What serves technique if it functions as limitation? Of course, this technique compels to rules, to group behaviors, to a completely different organization. There’s also the equipment. I am accustomed to a small camera that is already part of my body, of my eye. In the preparation I used that one – with it I made photos that gave origin to the shots; those, to be "more perfect", were recorded in DV Cam, a bigger camera, with better quality, sharper image and complex menus… this camera (anatomically inadequate to my body) needed a tripod and that also limited me, therefore it obliged me to delimit even more, to prepare the mise en scène in a more restricted way, more distant. Therefore I could not shrink the camera with my body movement, I could not lean it against my forehead or get close to the actor’s face; what I wanted was the actor improvising in front of me. Sometimes I wanted to be just a witness, to make a malleable cinema, not exactly contemplation and never of dictatorships... for this, the camera should have to be invisible, as those surveillance cameras that I wanted to use in the first project; but the "surveillance" I wanted it is not a Big Brother concept, it is INTIMACY that interests me.